


The Best of Us

by Sintari (OriginalSintari)



Category: Ozark (TV)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-20
Updated: 2019-01-20
Packaged: 2019-10-13 11:45:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,108
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17487482
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OriginalSintari/pseuds/Sintari
Summary: He’s the only thing in this world that she’ll ever fucking love.





	The Best of Us

Ruth’s phone rings. The picture that pops up on the screen is one that always makes her smile. Wyatt, asleep on the couch by their fire pit with one of his stolen Ray Bradbury hardbacks propped open on his chest. Opening the door to that sight – back in that time before they were all fatherless - she’d caught the screen door with her hand, and edged it shut inch by inch so as not to wake him with the squeak of ungreased hinges. Then she’d tiptoed like a burglar to avoid every loose floorboard on the trailer’s porch, dirtied up one knee of her jeans to find just the right angle, then steadied her phone’s camera.

In the picture on her phone now, one curl of Wyatt’s hair loops across his cheek in the closest thing to art Ruth Langmore had ever seen in real life. He doesn’t know she has this picture, and as far as she’s concerned, he never will. 

She considers her phone as Wyatt’s ringtone plays out. The first time she’d heard from him in months, and it’s a video call to boot. Fucking fuck.

She smooths her curls back from her face, thanking her lucky stars that her office at Lickety Splitz is currently only lit by her desk lamp. She knows her face is too pale, her cheeks too hollow. It’s just that she doesn’t really care. Ruth Langmore don’t have to impress nobody. 

Squaring her shoulders, she hits the button to accept the call.

His face appears on the screen, and the first thing she notices is his hair is longer, and not pulled back in a barrette today. In fact, it’s whipping across his face, which fills the screen, outlined only by clouded blue sky. 

She can hear the wind gusting, and the first words her cousin says to her in one hundred and six days are “I’m in Florida!”

He pulls the phone back to reveal an expanse of sand behind him, and foaming water that is most definitely not the lake. But then Charlotte enters stage left, and throws her arms around his neck, and now both of them are looking into the phone, long hair blowing in their faces, glassy-eyed and grinning like lunatics. 

“Hey, Ruth!” Charlotte waves.

“Y’all are drunk,” she says dully, and wishes she could take it back when the grin on Wyatt’s face dims just a little. Charlotte buries her face in his chest, and the phone drops for a second to reveal their swimsuits and bare, sandy toes until Wyatt rights it again. 

“I always wanted to see the ocean,” Wyatt says, looking marginally more sober now, looking right into the phone’s camera, and Ruth swears she feels her heartbeat stutter. 

“Y’all with Marty?” she recovers herself enough to ask. 

“No,” he says. He looks away for a moment, grinning at something off camera, and that’s a sight Ruth hasn’t seen in so very long. She doesn’t blink.

“No,” Wyatt repeats, and he’s looking at her again. “It was Charlotte’s idea. Guess this is what rich kids do for Spring Break when they don’t come to the Lake. Hey! Ow!” Ruth guesses he’s suffering some off-camera punishment for that remark.

She sits the phone down on her desk, so that the camera now faces dropped tiles and cobwebs and God-knows-what else is on the ceiling of her office. Of course, it was Charlotte who had the bright idea to show him the ocean for the first time. Something Ruth never would have thought of, not in a million years. That’s the difference between people like Charlotte and people like her. She pinches her nose and concentrates on stilling her heartbeat. Can’t cry when you can’t breathe.

“Hey Ruth,” from the phone still lying flat on her desk she hears Wyatt’s tinny voice and the gusting wind.

She picks the phone back up, so they’re looking at each other again. 

“Are you okay?” he asks. 

It’s only March and he’s got his summer tan already, she notes.

He looks happy.

“I’m fine,” she lies.

“Look,” he says. He turns the camera and pans it in a wide circle from one end of the beach out over the ocean, where the sun hangs like an egg yolk in the sky, to the beach’s opposite end. He lingers on the ocean part, letting her take a good look.

“That’s all I wanted to show you,” he says.

She knows that he’s looking into one piece of cut glass and she’s looking into another and over all these miles they’re not really meeting eyes at all, but when he gives her the smallest of smiles it feels like two years ago when things were as simple as they were ever going to get for Ruth and Wyatt Langmore and they just hadn’t known it yet.

“Wyatt!” It’s Charlotte’s voice.

“Gotta go,” he says. A pause. “Hey, Ruth? Happy birthday.”

Oh. It is.

But “bye,” is all she says. Then she pushes the button to disconnect before he can say anything else, and now she’s running her thumb over the darkened glass of her phone where Wyatt’s face had just been.

Ruth Langmore isn’t someone who sits at a desk and cries. So, she’s secretly grateful when Amber Lynn- no wait, this one’s Ashley Ann – totters into the office on her Lucite heels without knocking first. By the time she finishes off her rant with “And if you come in here without knocking again, I swear to God Sam’s going to have to tie you to that fucking pole,” her hands are no longer shaking, and Wyatt’s face isn’t there behind her eyelids every time she even blinks. 

She’s a professional titty bar manager, that’s what Ruth Langmore is. She spends the next hours observing the size of her bartenders’ pours, having words with an overly-handsy patron who couldn’t put his money where his mouth wanted to be, and comparing the night’s take with a comparable weeknight last year on her spreadsheet. By the time she counts the till and locks the freshly sparkling clean money in the safe after closing, she’ll have to check her call log to make sure it really even happened. 

She glances out the window after turning out the floor lights. The same KC mob asshole is parked out there again tonight, and she double checks for the gun in the pocket of her hoodie. As she picks her way around a sticky puddle of God-knows-what that’ll need to be mopped up tomorrow, she thinks of Wyatt. Happy, and far, far away from here. It’s worth it, she thinks. It’s worth every second.

**Author's Note:**

> I wish I had time to make this a mult-parter. And that this fandom were bigger. Happy to offer my small contribution to the cause!


End file.
